Best Practices in OBIEE BMM Layer

1. Use the Business Names in the Logical Layer itself. This will reduce the rework in the presentation layer.
2. Use the Set Icon feature to easily distinguish the Development Areas or functional areas.
3. Remove ETL unused fields in the BMM Layer Only.
4. Use rename wizard to rename all the columns and tables

Best Practices in OBIEE Physical Layer

1. Use alias for every Dimensional Warehouse tables.
2. Set Connection Pool Maximum Connections to 10. Increasing the number of connections will increase the multiple connections to database so Increase it as per the recommendations by DBA. More connections will result multiple idle sessions which will in turn decrease the performance.
3. Set the appropriate Database Features in the Connection Pool Properties. Sometimes you will encounter the errors related to database features. Align with DBA to find actual features.
4. Turn of cache for the tables which dont require cacheing.
5. Use alias tables to remove Circular Joins.
6. Check for the Data Types for each columns.

OBIEE Interview Questions

1. What is an Alias? An alias is a reference to the existing table off the data warehouse in the physical layer OBIEE
2. What are the uses of Alias? which can be used for user defined names in the physical layer which will help us in removing circular joins another use  is we can maintain user defined names for the actual tables
3. What is the difference between Alias and Presentation Alias? physical  alias will be used in the physical layer which will be used in the physical layer. Presentation alias is a reference to the older name of the previous logical column name or presentation name.
4. How to use Complex Join in Physical Layer?.  Drag arrow from first table to second and use fx button to write join condition using between operator.
5. Is it possible to use Outer Join in Physical Layer? No
6. What is LTS? LTS stands for Logical Table Source. It contains there refetence to physical layer objects.
7. How to give left outer join between two tables in obiee? In the BMM Layer, double click on the join and select the type of the join.
8. What are level bases matrices? Matrices which are calculated at the dimensional hierarchy level. Ex: Yearly Sales
9. What is fact less fact? Fact which doesn't have any measurable fields such dollars, amount etc..it will contain only the foreign keys of the dimensions.
10. What is an implicit fact? ImImplicit fact is used to tell the server to refer default fact when attributes from dimensions are referred.

OBIEE Supplier Dump for Practice

You can use the below links to download OBIEE Supplier Schema which you can use for practicing any of the Datawarehouse reporting

Link to download Supplier Schema

http://downloads.ziddu.com/download/25274656/Batch_Supplier_2.rar.html

There are two files .dmp file which contains tables and columns with related data. another one for creating user schema.

BI Publisher Reports not found in OBIEE Catalog

There could be two problems which will cause this Issue

1. Reports may not be present in Shared Folder.

• Go to the respective path of the shared folder where the reports should be present.
• If you see that there are no reports then this will be because of GUIDs.
• To Resolve it you just need to refresh the GUIDs so that you will able to see the reports.

To Update GUIDs, Modify the configuration in the NQSconfig.ini

• FMW_UPDATE_ROLE_AND_USER_REF_GUIDS=YES

Make sure that it is set as NO after you restart the system with YES

2. The user may not have the proper privileges to view the report.

• Just check the Security Properties on the BI Publisher Folders with Administrator User.
• Change the roles assigned to it with respective roles.

Hope the above resolution will fix the Issue.

High Availability configuration when two database present

Follow the below steps to configure OBIEE to refer two databases dynamically.

• Prepare an Update statement which will update the DSN name of the Primary and Secondary Node.
• Create a Dynamic Repository Variable to refresh at the regular Interval and refer the DSN column from the above table. This will check the Active DSN name.
• Use the above variable reference in the Connection Pool so that It will refer the query to get the Active DSN every time.
• Now During the start and End of load execute the Update Statement created at the Step 1.

Automatically during the load the queries will be fired on the secondary server so that users can experience faster results even during the load time.

Issue with large excel output in BI Publisher

If you are facing large memory issue in excel output of BI Publisher. Use Excel template to overcome that issue.

You can also use the excel features to render charts and pivot tables.